AI tutors
Khanmigo is one of a new wave of AI-fuelled teaching and learning screen apps aimed at students, teachers and parents, the last of these the crucial audience as they are the most likely to mistrust AI solutions – and pay for them once trust is gained. As with all the AI tools we’ve examined so far, these apps personalise and deliver a training programme based on existing data from years of study of educational methods. The most user-friendly of these promise to guide their users to the correct answers to their tasks, rather than simply handing the solutions over on request.
Voice assistants and chatbots
Merlyn and TeachMateAI use voice interactions to guide students through learning programmes, but they’re not there simply to answer questions. Such tools will also understand when a topic is complex and needs thorough explanation at a slower pace, and will prompt related discussions to help approach a challenge from another angle. Other voice assistants such as Sharky are designed to help visually impaired students with their progress, and indeed this hints at a much wider use for such apps: voice-assisted tools are already proving useful when managing all sorts of disabilities, in the financial and corporate worlds as well as in the field of education.
Revision tools
Ah, revision – potentially the most boring activity on the planet. Jazz it up with flashcard apps from Jungle, Revisely and StudyFetch, which will delve through your notes on the subject at hand and come up with prompts to jog your memory for the key facts that you need. You could also prompt a chatbot to quiz you on a topic and mark your responses, while NotebookLM can create a podcast on the subject you’re revising and play it for you while you’re away from your desk, making learning less of a chore and more entertaining. And on that note, learning should be fun – why not let AI make it that way?
Teaching music
Gone are the days when learning an instrument meant sitting in someone’s dusty living room and playing ‘Kumbaya, My Lord’ 800 times while trying not to pass out with boredom. Fire up any one of many music-study apps (Waveform and LalalalAI for electronica, Flowkey and Skoove for piano, Chordify for guitars, Drumate for drums, even Tonestra for brass) and the AI behind them will personalise a study course for you. It will progress at a pace that’s right for you, suggest songs that you actually like, and best of all, it won’t tut and roll its eyes if you play a G7 chord rather than an F sharp.
Language learning
Duolingo has been the best-known language-learning app for some years now, with a friendly interface that gets you speaking new words quickly – and authentically, with the help of audio pronunciation. That platform has progressed into other areas of study such as maths, but the original language focus is still very useful. Other tools such as HelloTalk and Tandem take the approach further by connecting the learner with a native speaker of the desired language. Busuu even places you in the centre of a midsized community of language learners, making your immersion complete – essential if you want to learn quickly.
Essay analysis
Markme, Tilf and Essay Grader all use AI to feed back on assignments (if you’re a student) or actually mark them (if you’re a teacher or lecturer) and in the former case are obviously highly useful if you want to know if an essay is going to get an A, an F or a grade in between. The most user-friendly of these will add constructive feedback as they go along, pointing out areas of achievement and others that could use some extra work, in other words helping you to improve rather than just slapping a grade on your work and moving on.
Buff up your CV
Could your CV or résumé use a bit of spit and polish to help get you noticed? Rezi, Jobscan and other apps claim to transform your basic list of qualifications, hobbies and work experience into a document that no self-respecting HR exec would dream of passing up. On a related note, we’ve read – although this is mere speculation, of course – that certain recruitment firms use tools such as ChatGPT to sort out the best CVs from the rest, so you might want to make sure that you include the appropriate phrasing for a given job in the document.
Career Advice
Are you just entering the world of work, looking for the next step up, or even counting down the last few years before glorious retirement? Then try a careers advice or coaching app, the AI in which can be pretty skilled at figuring out your next move on the nine-to-five hamster wheel if you fill out the forms correctly. Warning: the results may be a little inaccurate (and hilarious) if you don’t get the prompts right: we gave Coach and CareersPro a test-drive before writing this, and they told us we should be a hypnotherapist or a zookeeper.
Personalised course suggestions
“Over 1.4 billion people will need to reskill over the next three years!” runs the slightly alarmist blurb on the website for one course-suggestion app. While there may be some truth to that, a large chunk of the world’s population has always been engaged in learning of some sort, so nothing’s changed. What has changed is that those 1.4 billion people don’t necessarily need to attend a school, college or other educational establishment to skill up, given the plethora of apps (such as LinkedIn Learning) which will point them towards the appropriate course or courses and suggest the best way to study.
Gamified learning
Why learn to code by making lists of symbols on a screen when you can create code for a first-person shooter game instead? As educational psychologists have been saying for at least a century or so by now, learning is most effective when it’s fun, although anyone who has worked as a teacher will know that this is easier said than done. Apps such as ClassCraft, Forest and CodeCombat all allow you to study without focusing primarily on studying: they offer you so-called ‘gamified learning’ instead, where you’re thinking about how to defeat a boss or rout an army. In that context, writing code isn’t dull, it’s fun.
Focus aids
Some people like to study with music playing. Others can only focus in complete silence. Well, apps such as BrainFM and Endel argue that there’s a compromise between those two positions, playing you semi-musical sounds that will help you focus on your studies without even knowing it. Even cooler, the AI in these and similar tools will sample the ambient noise of the room you’re in and play complementary frequencies that hide or improve them, so that you’re in the perfect position, sonically speaking anyway, to get some learning done. Can they hide the sound of the neighbour’s dog barking? That would be ideal, thanks.
Text to speech to text
Which works best for you when you’re taking in new information: hearing it or reading it? This depends on your individual learning style, of which there are actually at least four (visual and kinetic learning styles are usually the others). Fortunately, you can choose either delivery method, or both, with text-to-speech and speech-to-text apps such as Speechify and OtterAI, the latter of which started life as a simple meetings-transcription tool a few years ago. Try both information delivery styles and see which works best for you. Unlike the questions on the exam you’re going to sit at some point, there are no right answers here.